Line of Control: How India and Pakistan share one of the world's most dangerous borders

To unrecorded on the Line of Control (LoC) - the volatile de facto borderline that separates India and Pakistan - is to beryllium perpetually connected the razor's borderline betwixt fragile bid and unfastened conflict.

The caller escalation aft the Pahalgam attack brought India and Pakistan to the brink erstwhile again. Shells rained down connected some sides of the LoC, turning homes to rubble and lives into statistics. At slightest 16 radical were reportedly killed connected the Indian side, portion Pakistan claims 40 civilian deaths, though it remains unclear however galore were straight caused by the shelling.

"Families connected the LoC are subjected to Indian and Pakistani whims and look the brunt of heated tensions," Anam Zakaria, a Pakistani writer based successful Canada, told the BBC.

"Each clip firing resumes galore are thrust into bunkers, livestock and livelihood is lost, infrastructure - homes, hospitals, schools - is damaged. The vulnerability and volatility experienced has sedate repercussions for their mundane lived reality," Ms Zakaria, writer of a publication connected Pakistan-administered Kashmir, said.

India and Pakistan stock a 3,323km (2,064-mile) border, including the 740km-long LoC; and the International Border (IB), spanning astir 2,400km. The LoC began arsenic the Ceasefire Line successful 1949 aft the archetypal India-Pakistan war, and was renamed nether the 1972 Simla Agreement.

The LoC cutting done Kashmir - claimed successful afloat and administered successful parts by some India and Pakistan - remains 1 of the astir militarised borders successful the world. Conflict is ne'er acold down and ceasefires are lone arsenic durable arsenic the adjacent provocation.

Ceasefire violations present tin scope from "low-level firing to large onshore grabbing to surgical strikes", says Happymon Jacob, a overseas argumentation adept astatine Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). (A onshore drawback could impact seizing cardinal positions specified arsenic hilltops, outposts, oregon buffer zones by force.)

The LoC, galore experts say, is simply a classical illustration of a "border drawn successful blood, forged done conflict". It is besides a line, arsenic Ms Zakaria says, "carved by India and Pakistan, and militarised and weaponised, without taking Kashmiris into account".

Such wartime borders aren't unsocial to South Asia. Sumantra Bose, prof of planetary and comparative authorities astatine Krea University successful India and writer of Kashmir astatine the Crossroads: Inside a 21st-Century Conflict, says the astir well-known is the 'Green Line' - the ceasefire enactment of 1949 - which is the mostly recognised bound betwixt Israel and the West Bank.

Not surprisingly, the tentative calm on the LoC that had endured since the 2021 ceasefire statement betwixt the 2 nuclear-armed neighbours crumbled easy aft the latest hostilities.

"The existent escalation connected the LoC and International Border (IB) is important arsenic it follows a four-year play of comparative bid connected the border," Surya Valliappan Krishna of Carnegie India told the BBC.

Violence on the India-Pakistan borderline is not caller - anterior to the 2003 ceasefire, India reported 4,134 violations successful 2001 and 5,767 successful 2002.

The 2003 ceasefire initially held, with negligible violations from 2004 to 2007, but tensions resurfaced successful 2008 and escalated sharply by 2013.

Between 2013 and aboriginal 2021, the LoC and the IB witnessed sustained precocious levels of conflict. A renewed ceasefire successful February 2021 led to an contiguous and sustained driblet successful violations done to March 2025.

"During periods of aggravated cross-border firing we've seen borderline populations successful the galore thousands beryllium displaced for months connected end," says Mr Krishna. Between precocious September and aboriginal December 2016, much than 27,000 radical were displaced from borderline areas owed to ceasefire violations and cross-border firing.